USA Africa Dialogue Series - “Young, Rich, and African”

As a person who resents the romanticization and infantilization of Africa and Africans, I love the Netflix show "Young, Rich, and African."

It portrays young Africans in their imperfect and complex glories, in the full range of their variegated African humanity.

The young, "rich" Africans in the show are simultaneously confident and insecure, ambitious and unsure, loud and introspective, driven and limited, sophisticated and trashy, matured and petty, thoughtful and emotionally volatile, friendly and adversarial, toxic and compassionate, authentic and performatively shallow, mellow and dramatic, grounded yet unabashedly malleable and restless.

This is how Africans should be portrayed. We are human beings, equal parts good and bad, equal parts noble and dishonorable.

That's the story of humanity everywhere. We Africans are not and cannot be different.

Both escapist patronizing Left thought and conservative Right Wing dehumanizing tropes, their differential motivations aside, ahistorically and unfaithfully say otherwise.

They're both wrong.


Sent from my iPhone

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/2D452092-CA6B-47A4-A1A8-BCDAAD711AE9%40gmail.com.